The things businesses don't notice in their own operations

I've just arrived at an AstuteOps client site for the first time to meet with their Operations Team. The business acknowledges that the team performs well, meaning that they manage to react to many and varied customer requests, but it is regularly just in the nick of time and habitually overcoming last minute hiccups. The rest of the business acknowledges that the operations team are committed. The team recognises that many of the jobs that got pushed from yesterday’s schedule appear as urgent requests for today, and so the relentless cycle continues.

As I meet with the next key staff member (in this case the Despatch Manager), I get the familiar “sorry, just give me 5 more minutes, I need to handle something urgent first”. I offer to just tag along and hang unobtrusively in the background. Discretely I make observations and note the decisions that the team could not make easily, the issues that could not be managed using the ‘standard process’, the reasons why the sales team keep calling about upcoming jobs, and the customers demanding answers.

This is the controlled chaos that is an operations team’s daily life. It is unrelenting and consumes every available minute of every day. While the team is focussed on the ‘HOW’ (doing ‘stuff’ to get an outcome) … I am interested in the ‘WHY’? (do many of these activities I am seeing need to be done at all? )

When I eventually manage to sit down and meet with the operations team as a collective, they give me a list of the biggest issues as they see them. “… a new machine”, “… more staff”, “… better suppliers”, “… more training”. It is rare that their list has much overlap with the ‘secret’ list that I constructed earlier from my observations. Their list has many valid ideas, but it normally involves spending money to increase the speed of how things currently happen.

My list rarely includes any significant expenditure. My list is about lost & wasted TIME and where the time is going. Where can simple changes to internal processes reduce the NOISE? How can error and waste elimination create time that can be used productively to reshape the operations environment?

Why do many businesses not recognise these issues themselves? Being on stage and an actor in the play is very different to being in the balcony watching the play. Over time, key operations personnel become so caught up in the ‘business-as-usual’ that they can no longer objectively see the environment in which the day-to-day activities take place. It is easy to start believing that “this is just the way it is”. An experienced, trained, set of fresh eyes can see possibilities where the team sees … nothing at all.

AstuteOps has extensive experience in operations management for building,

construction and light manufacturing businesses. We have a deep understanding

of manufacturing operations, and proven capabilities in business optimisation and change

management. We get teams working, streamline processes and position businesses for success.

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